Caitlin Keogh

As part of a continuing series of off-site projects, Lisa Cooley is excited to announce the installation of Caitlin Keogh’s multi-paneled painting Fragment From Botticelli’s Primavera Allegory: Chloris, a Nymph, is Pursued and Raped by the Wind God Zephyrus. After the Rape, Chloris Becomes the Goddess Flora, the Source of All Flowers, which will be on view at Maryam Nassir Zadeh. This will mark the gallery’s second collaboration with the store, the first being the installation of Andy Coolquitt’s no I didn’t go to any museums here I hate museums museums are just stores that charge you to come in there are lots of free museums here but they have names like real stores in January 2014.

Maryam’s space provides a rich context for Keogh’s painting, given some of the artist’s source material: fashion magazines, assorted fabrics, historical decorative motifs, and mannequin hands, which all call to mind projection, desire, self-creation, as well as the commodification and veiling of flesh. For this new work, Keogh isolates a detail from Botticelli’s well known painting Primavera, reducing and cropping its contents to recontextualize the image. By drawing attention to the figures’ hands and the surrounding flora, Keogh can continue looking at some recurring themes in her work: narrative, appropriation, violence, costume, idealized beauty, and expectations of taste.

Botticelli’s work was commissioned as a wedding gift to Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de’ Medici, and the embedded message of the painting targets a new bride with notions of obedience, sacrifice, and chastity. The mythological allegory of Chloris transforming into Flora, goddess of flowers, youth, and fertility, promotes and idealizes a role realized through submission. Keogh’s large-scale rendering of a fragment from the painting allows a new bend to this otherwise decided imagery. The painting’s installation and its context—hanging high in a shop—points towards signage, painted scenery, and murals, and away from high art. It also treats the exhibition space as a theatrical space. The painting’s crop and focus emphasize the allegorical, psychological, and historic fragmentation of bodies.

Caitlin Keogh was born in 1982 in Spenard, Alaska, and currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She holds an MFA from Bard College, New York, and a BFA from The Cooper Union School of Art, New York. Recent solo exhibitions include The Corps, Mary Boone Gallery, New York (2015), and Good Value, Fine Quality, MoMA PS1, New York (2012). She has participated in select group exhibitions at Algus Greenspon, New York (forthcoming); Melas Papadopoulos, Greece (2013); Renwick Gallery, New York (2011); Kunsthalle Zurich, Switzerland (2011); and White Columns, New York (2010).